entirely safe and fun

But wait, there’s more!

Now that I’ve had the Qtek 8500 i-Mate Smartflip (see below for details) for a few weeks, I’m ready to continue my review. It came to light in the weeks following its release that the 8500 was saddled with a showstopper bug. Apparently, if left idle for ten minutes, the phone would go into deep power-saving mode, turning off its radio to conserve power. No radio means no calls, no ringing, no indication of missed calls, no voicemail indicator, nothing. I was mostly unaffected by the bug, probably because of my habit of leaving an IM client running almost all day, and possibly because of my constant use of an A2DP stereo Bluetooth headset whose buttons I press frequently to adjust volume and so on. But I reproduced it easily enough, realized that I had been surprised by voicemail a few times, listened to my friend Ian’s tale of woe… and decided to take action. (I’ve got some good things to say too.) Read on for the stirring saga!.

There are two solutions to this problem. One is to run some user-space code which calls a power-management API function like SystemIdleTimerReset() from time to time; this could be rough on the battery. Ian tried this solution and reports that it appears to be working - he no longer has problems with missed calls, but says that “you’ll need to recharge nightly,” which isn’t an unfamiliar situation for smartphone users anyway… He is using Slipstream Solutions’ Stay Connected and I trust he’ll have something to add in a comment at some point.

I decided to take the hard road and updated my phone’s ROM. This is the third time I’ve rewritten the operating system of one of my phones; it gets less nerve-wracking each time, but it’s never enjoyable or completely safe. First, I needed to vendor-unlock my phone, though why it was so locked in the first place I have no clue, since I bought it unsubsidized. In the end, I used the service provided by imei-check to pwn my phone, which I paid for and own outright, grumble, stupid vendor restrictions. Then I found an appropriate replacement OS image for the hardware, that being the i-Mate Smartflip ROM much discussed on Howard Forums, and flashed my phone. After the update, the bug was flushed. But of course, my woes were not at their end.

My last nerve

The i-Mate ROM was locked down, again preventing me from controlling my own phone, which is completely intolerable. I had to deal with that by installing an manufacturer-signed registry editor and appunlocking my phone as detailed here. Only then was I able to change the Remote API settings as detailed here, using Microsoft’s Security Configuration Manager Powertoy, and reprovision my phone with no application security, allowing me to do useful things like use a desktop-based registry editor or deploy code I write myself to my phone. Why carry a computer you can’t program? It’s a waste.

And so now, I have my phone back, hopefully free of awful bugs and pointless restrictions. Aside from that one crippling but corrigible flaw, the phone is the best I’ve ever used. To get my two other complaints out of the way, it is easy to fat-finger the soft buttons at the top of the keypad and accidentally hit the Talk or End button, and there really should be more RAM, so that web browsing and MP3 playback don’t interfere with each other. On to the good stuff!

I hadn’t used a portable MP3 player in several years, until I got the 8500 and the Motorola HT820 stereo Bluetooth headset to go with it. Being able to listen to MP3s, and even better, to Web radio, with no wires, is elegant and pleasing. The sound quality is quite good, and the ability to switch rapidly between music and phone functionality ices it. Also cool is the 30′ or so of range, allowing me to pace about the office while listening to music or taking a call, and leaving my phone tethered to the computer to charge and sync.

I’ve been using the Plantronics Explorer 320 mono Bluetooth headset, to good effect. It’s reasonably comfortable, goes days between charges, looks OK, and is aggressively priced. Until I used one myself, I thought that wandering around with a bug in one’s ear was an execrable affectation; I have concluded that attendant conveniences of operating a phone without having to retrieve it from one’s pocket or bag, and of typing or driving without wires, make the practice quite understandable.

The new version of Pocket Internet Explorer is a significant improvement over the version that shipped with 2002 and 2003 Smartphones. It has a single-column rendering mode which outperforms Opera Mobile’s, and has taken that browser’s spot as my weapon of choice. Neither browser, irritatingly, looks quite as good as Opera Mini - but the feature lacunae of Mini render it less than suitable for use on a Smartphone. Loved it on my interim w600i though.

One small but growing complaint is that none of the browsers seem to support a modern DOM, condemning them not to be able to run AJAX-based web applications without extensive and painful modification (but see this article on the IE Mobile dev blog). MS? Opera? Mozilla? Bueller?

I mentioned in the first part of my review that this is a phone carved from a solid block of sexy by master sexy artisans, and experience has borne it out. People stop me to ask about the phone when I have it out — this is as close as I will ever get to to being stunningly hot. There is something to be said for buying good-looking equipment, once you’ve figured out where the performance is.

Cingular is apparently going to be rolling the 8500 out as the Cingular 3125 very shortly, and they will presumably address the power-management issue. If they do, I can’t recommend this phone enough to a power user looking for a serious tool with a minimum of bulk.